and silt invaded their roots creating ghost forests still visible today. Decades later these Alaska ghost forests were the clue to figuring out that the Cascadia subduction zone offshore of Washington also had a magnitude-9 megathrust earthquake in 1700.
In particular at an archaeological site near Bucharest Romania scientists found charred Cannabis seeds from plants in some tombs.
either male or female with male plants producing pollen that pollinates the seed-producing flowers of the female plant).
The presence of burnt seeds in these tombs proves that the prehistoric societies of Eastern europe were aware of this
or nests that are built into the crooks of branches To get from tree to tree
They bury their acorns but forget where they put them. The forgotten acorns become oak trees.
Nina Sen contributed to this article. Other resources l
#Papadum the Goat and His Model Genome (Gallery)< p>Currently living on a farm In virginia Papadum was selected recently by the U s. Department of agriculture (USDA) to represent one of more than twenty distinct goat populations from the United states Africa and other
while others say It must have tasted just like vinegar with twigs in it.)While the wine wouldn't be
which tended to spread into long tendrils bobbing in the currents would head next. These findings could be useful for ocean navigation Jutzeler said.
Most monkeys eat nuts fruits seeds and flowers. Some monkeys also eat meat in the form of bird's eggs small lizards insects and spiders.
These monkeys can quickly walk on two legs across a tree branch. Old world monkeys and humans share a common ancestor.
and scratch him climb away and even jump to another tree branch. She'll do everything in her capacity to reject him Ellis said adding that females appear to reject males successfully more than they accept them in the wild.
They're found mainly in many fish nuts seeds and oils from plants. Some examples of foods that contain these fats are salmon trout herring avocados olives walnuts and liquid vegetable oils such as soybean corn safflower canola olive and sunflower.
eight slender red maple branches clipped from trees growing in NC State s Hill Forest. I found my way to this particular spot ditch
A couple of degrees warming can make the difference between a stately shade tree and a sad bedraggled specimen with dead branches sparse leaves and grimy scale-encrusted bark.
I became extremely grateful to scores of plant biologists like the one who archived a foot-long maple twig from Hill Forest in 1971.
It turns out that many of these old twigs still have stuck scale insects intact firmly but inconspicuously to the spots where they once lived.
when only 12 branches into my first search in the UNC Herbarium there was a gloomy scale#he same species that burdens our urban red maples.
Even on 100-year old branches the scales looked perfect. So I counted them. And kept counting them on more than 300 historical specimens from the southeastern US then matched up their abundance with historical temperatures for the year
During relatively cool historical time periods only 17%of branches had scale insects. But during relatively hot periods 36%were infested.
In other words scale-infested branches were more than twice as common during hot periods than cool periods#xactly as we would expect
Furthermore the most heavily infested twigs were had ones that grown at temperatures similar to those of modern urban Raleigh.
so to test our prediction we needed to go back to places where those old branches were collected originally
At 16 of the 20 sites gloomy scale populations were denser than they were on the original branches from the same locations.
when a 600-year-old canoe with a turtle carved on its hull emerged from a sand dune after a harsh storm.
The hull measured about 20 feet (6. 08 meters) long and it was made from matai
Carbon dating tests showed that the vessel was last caulked with wads of bark in 1400.
Johns and colleagues say it's likely that the hull once had a twin and together these vessels formed a double canoe (though the researchers haven't ruled out the possibility that the find could have been a single canoe with an outrigger).
In the study the protein scaffold that holds the cells of a pig bladder in place worked by attracting stem cells to the site the injury
because therapy signals the stem cells to make new muscle. Badylak told Live Science that this technique could also solve some problems of current stem cell therapies.
One big issue is that simply injecting stem cells into an area of the body isn't enough since many of those cells simply die.
The new study shows that a scaffold and a signal from surrounding muscles seems to be help regrow the muscle.
Though you might think of it as just another nut in the trail mix the cashew is a decidedly strange snack.
The tree produces a long fleshy stalk called a cashew apple which resembles a small pear.
At the end of this stalk grows the kidney-shaped cashew nut that many know and love. Cashew nuts are protected from hungry passerby by a double shell containing a potent poison called anacardic acid.
and roasted a process that rids the nut of toxic oils and leaves its shell brittle and easy to remove.
Along with Brazil nuts and almonds cashews have the highest magnesium content per serving of any tree nut.
Top 10 Cancer-Fighting Foods And in addition to the cashew's known nutritional benefits researchers have explored also the possibility of using the toxic oil found in the nut's shell as an antibiotic.
Cashew nut oil as well as the leaves and bark of the cashew tree have also been used in traditional medicines in communities around the world to treat everything from toothaches to diabetes.
Bears can also create a den by digging a hole into a hillside or under tree roots.
and debris on branches and tree bark trapping and preserving them for millions of years.
Trees there appeared either to secrete resin directly from the bases of their trunks or drop resin from their branches entombing creatures living beneath the forest canopy Heads said.
That's the case for the new pygmy locust species which was fossilized in amber after its death.
Mast is a botanical term for the hard nut fruits produced by trees like beeches and acorns.
They usually eat vegetation such as wild celery shoots roots fruit tree bark and tree pulp but they have been known to eat small animals and insects.
17 percent comes from leaves seeds and stems; and 3 percent comes from termites and caterpillars.
The mountain gorilla eats a diet that is about 86 percent leaves shoots and stems; 7 percent roots;
3 percent flowers; 2 percent fruit; and 2 percent snails ants and grubs. Gorillas live in groups.
While orange peels are edible they are not nearly as sweet or juicy as the pulp.
NASA's Terra satellite went leaf peeping last week from its perch about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above the planet.
Fall Foliage Seen from Space As the Earth Observatory notes the brown and orange hues are currently most prominent in Michigan's Upper Peninsula northern Wisconsin upstate New york New hampshire Vermont Maine and southern
The images also show traces of phytoplankton blooms in the Great lakes and off the North Atlantic coast.
Meanwhile fiery reds and deep purple leaf colors come from anthocyanins which are produced exclusively in the fall in response to stress.
Climate change might affect the way leaf-peeping season shakes out in the future. Simulations featured in the Climate Change Tree Atlas show how some populations of fall favorites might shift.
Climate change might also postpone the onset of leaf-color changes and leave fall hues lingering later into the year.
or Worcestershire sauce that were made for dipping asparagus tips or cauliflower florets. By the 1950s the Lipton Company was searching for new ways to market its line of dried instant soups.
A postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hoban helps determine how many seeds are needed
Well-planned seed collections he says are an important tool in preserving endangered species and promoting agricultural sustainability.
and storing them in botanic gardens or seed banks. I use mathematical and genetic models to determine how many seeds are needed
and where they should be collected from geographically in order to best preserve a species'diversity diversity that will be needed to adapt in the future.
Well-planned seed collections can also capture valuable traits like adaptations to drought and disease
and eventually propagate the saved seeds into a future environment. What do you like best about your work?
When planted peanut seeds (kernels) grow into small 18-inch plants with oval-shaped leaves. The peanut plant appears unremarkable at first glance
but unlike most other plants its flowers bloom above ground while its fruits (peanuts) develop below ground.
After self-pollination the flowers lose their petals as the fertilized ovaries in the center of the flowers begin to enlarge.
The plant's pedicels stalks connecting to the ovaries curve downward pointing the budding ovaries toward the ground.
The plant consists of stocky leaves whorled around a central stem. In a healthy pineapple plant the tapered swordlike leaves can grow up to about 5 feet (1. 5 meters) long.
The pineapple fruit grows out of the top of the central stem. The fruit is actually the result of dozens of individual fruit-producing flowers that have fused into a single fruit
Unlike most fruits pineapples are grown not from seeds. Common commercial varieties of pineapples are self-incompatible meaning that the plants'pollen cannot fertilize members of the same variety.
When removed the crown of the pineapple fruit contains small roots. If it's planted into the ground
Additionally the plant's suckers (side shoots that grow in between the leaves of the main stem)
The orange-fleshed tubers are especially high in Vitamin a (also called beta-carotene which is the carotenoid that turns into Vitamin a) vitamins C E and B6 fiber and manganese.
Sweet potatoes are compared roots to regular potatoes which are tubers (underground stems). Sweet potatoes are native to Central
and South america and have been grown for at least 10000 years. Christopher Columbus took sweet potatoes to Europe after his first voyage to the New world in 1492.
They typically eat seeds grass and plants. One swallow of food isn't enough for these animals.
possibly because large birds that act as seed dispersers have gone extinct in the area. And most of the regrown areas surveyed by her team are within 100 metres to two kilometres of primary forest,
he says that the leaf-albedo idea is probably much easier to implement. Agriculture is already a globally coordinated undertaking
And experiments have shown that spraying kaolin on leaf canopies to increase their albedo does not reduce the yield.
Switzerland, looked at changing the albedo of Earth's grasslands by encouraging plants with particular leaf geometries3.
Both genes fend of a wide range of'rust'fungi, including several types of stripe rust (Puccinia striiformis) and leaf rust (P. triticina.
The results are welcome news as plant pathologists race to arm themselves against an ongoing epidemic of stem rust (P. graminis) caused by a recently emerged fungus called Ug99 (see'Wheat fungus spreads out of Africa'.
From there, pathologists believe wind currents may sweep Ug99 spores into India and, eventually, China. Meanwhile, new types of stripe rust that can overcome the defences bred into commercial varieties have sparked a separate epidemic in the United states. It is amazing that we are still fighting this battle,
One such gene, called Lr34, has been fending off leaf and stripe rusts in some agricultural wheat for the past century.
In one study, infected wheat carrying only Lr34 had stripe rust covering 60%of its uppermost leaf
90%of the leaf was covered in rust. But in plants with both genes, only 5%of the leaf bore the fungus.
Dubcovsky has bred already lines that carry both genes and has begun to distribute them to farmers.
Hybrid embryos fail to live up to stem-cell hopes: Nature Newsthe creation of human-animal hybrid embryos proposed as a way to generate embryonic stem cells without relying on scarce human eggs has met with legislative hurdles and public outcry.
But a paper published this week suggests that the approach has another, more fundamental problem:
Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, a stem-cell company based in Los angeles, California, and his colleagues show that in their labs,
Cloning Stem Cells doi: 10.1089/clo. 2009.0004; 2009). ) The hybrid embryos also failed to properly express genes thought to be critical for pluripotency the ability to develop into a wide variety of cell types.
Brazilian sugarcane ethanol despite having an even higher indirect effect and being transported abroad, still performs better than any other biofuel.
The results, published today in PLOS Biology could bring plant breeders a step closer to generating crops that produce their seeds completely asexually a process called apomixis1.
But when hybrids are allowed to self-fertilize to produce the next generation of seeds, the intricate genetic networks that brought about this'hybrid vigor'are shuffled,
and only rarely produced viable seeds after fertilization. In contrast, the triple mutants created by Mercier
and fertilization produced viable triploid and tetraploid seeds. The results are encouraging, says Ueli Grossniklaus, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Zurich,
Researchers must first find out how to engineer crop plants to produce viable seeds from diploid reproductive cells without fertilization a process called parthenogenesis.
mutants that produced endosperm the nutritive tissue that surrounds the plant embryo in the seed without first being fertilized3.
Seed Vault in Norway an underground cavern containing a stock of plant seeds from around the world.
He thinks this stems in part from delays to the climate agenda caused by unrelated distractions,
Nature Newspolicy Events Business Facilities Environment<br></br>The week ahead Sound bites Number crunch<br></br>Policy Stem cells:
Restrictions on human embryonic stem-cell research in Japan were relaxed on 21 august, after updated government guidelines came into effect.
After almost three-and-a-half years, the trial of Korean stem-cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang may be drawing to a close.
His papers claiming that he had created cloned human embryonic stem cells were shown to be fabrications in January 2006.
Business Stem cells: Six months after giving it the green light, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted plans for the world's first clinical trial of a therapy generated from human embryonic stem cells.
The product's manufacturer, Geron in Menlo Park, California, had hoped to start human testing of its potential treatment for spinal-cord injury this summer (see Nature 457,516;
In a case study of an evergreen forest in Cambodia, Sasaki and his co-author Francis Putz from the University of Florida in Gainsville use inventory data for plots of trees with trunks wider than 5 centimetres to estimate that the forest
Of this, 71.4 tonnes is in trees that have trunks wider than 45 centimetres the trees that loggers are most likely to target.
when maize roots are damaged by pests2. Identifying more compounds that act as chemical signals is crucial,
which has promised a liberal approach to contentious research issues such as human embryonic stem cells and genetically modified crops (see Nature 461,456-457;
Stem-cell oversight: The International Society for Stem Cell Research has created a committee to weed out companies that offer unapproved stem-cell'therapies'.
'The society's president, Irving Weissman of Stanford university in Palo alto, California, launched the committee on 22 september at the World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Maryland.
The 18-member panel plans to create a blacklist of companies that don't provide documentation showing that their treatments have been reported in peer-reviewed literature,
The week ahead 5-7 october The 2009 Nobel prizes for physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry are announced. http://nobelprize. org 5-7 october Singapore hosts the Stem Cells
and oil refiner Sinopec in Beijing to develop a process that uses maize stalks and leaves,
and it opened a research unit in Brazil this year to study the conversion of sugarcane residues to ethanol.
the leading producer of genetically engineered seed, on transgenic crops. The Danforth Center was founded with grants from Monsanto's philanthropic arm among others,
As the burrowing beetles tunnel under the bark to feed and lay eggs, they release spores of the blue-stain fungus (Grosmannia clavigera),
which stops the production of a protective toxic resin released by the tree and allows the beetles to continue to infest.
but doesn't necessarily yield a lot of seeds. The plant takes three years or more to reach maturity,
) Jatropha had nearly four times the water footprint of sugar-cane ethanol, for instance. Critics point out what they see as flaws in that analysis,
and a decision to focus on key strategic areas, such as sugar-cane ethanol from Brazil, cellulosic ethanol from the United states and biobutanol.
In the meantime, D1 Oils has shifted from planting jatropha to focusing on basic research including starting a breeding programme to develop seeds with high oil yields
which it intends to develop enhanced seed strains to test, says chief executive Kirk Haney. Eventually, jatropha might prove more useful on a local scale.
where it provides jatropha seeds for farmers to plant among other crops or on spare land that is unsuitable for food crops.
In the Lao People's Democratic Republic, farmers have been bombarded with seeds and promotional material from companies but received little to no support, says Jakob Rietzler of the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy in Vientiane.
Zelt says that seeds optimized to produce more oil will be entering the market in the coming months,
consumes and rots the leaves and tubers of the plant. The mould still afflicts potatoes, tomatoes and related plants,
a joint venture between Jalna-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company and US seed giant Monsanto. The decision to seek further input has angered some crop scientists.
seed-planting will occur at different times from that of natural varieties, and farmers will be surveyed about the effect on native maize.
Jay Reichman, an authority on transgenic testing with the US Environmental protection agency in Corvallis, Oregon, says that overall the combined evidence suggests that at least two transgenes were present within the plant tissues in question.
indicating that they bore transgenes just like commercial seeds modified to be herbicide resistant. Fagan disputes the criticism.
That's because researchers can test seeds for DNA markers that flag up the presence of particular haplotypes,
but from its use in sugar-cane plantations. The team also tracked the health of 274 agricultural workers who had been exposed to glyphosate,
Hwang's human stem cells were all fakes'.'In May 2006, Lee was charged with embezzlement
With their deep roots and tall canopies, trees absorb and transpire more water than do grasses,
Tree roots help to filter water into the soil, thus slowing the rate at which water levels rise after rain.
Preserved tree trunks are scattered across the now-deserted lower Ica valley, about 200 km south of Lima, indicating a significant landscape change.
Today, seeds from domesticated sorghum grass are used as flour for porridge, as a fermentation substrate for beer and as a dye for clothing.
000 years ago and ended around 50,000 years ago depended on foodstuffs such as underground tubers and meat.
Nature Newspolicy Business Market watch Events Research The week ahead Number crunch Sound bites Policy Stem-cell lines:
On 2 december, the US National institutes of health (NIH) approved 13 human embryonic stem-cell lines for use by US government-funded researchers the first lines to be given the green light
Italian scientists have lost a final appeal against a government research call that explicitly excludes human embryonic stem cells,
and sugarcane, putting vehicles in competition with hungry mouths. In this week's Nature, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley,
That calculation is based on using Brazilian sugarcane, which is a much more efficient feedstock than maize;
In order to drive these large algal blooms you need iron says Costa. In fact, he says, the indirect benefits of iron fertilization from whale faeces might remove more carbon from the atmosphere by boosting algal growth than the growth of the whales themselves.
Nature Newspolicy Business Research Events People Business watch The week ahead Number crunch Sound bites Policy Stem-cell lines:
considering extending the definition of human embryonic stem-cell lines eligible for federal funding, to include those from earlier-stage embryos than currently allowed.
says Susan Fisher, a stem-cell biologist at the University of California, San francisco, who recently submitted ten lines derived from pre-blastocyst embryos to the NIH.
maize leaves and stalks, and municipal waste to sugars are getting cheaper. At a national US ethanol conference in Orlando, Florida, last week, biotech companies Novozymes and Genencor launched new generations of enzymes that they claim will cut the enzyme-related production costs of cellulosic ethanol
stem-cell research. Research president: Austrian social scientist Helga Nowotny has been elected president of the European Research Council (ERC),
such as analysis tracing mailed Bacillus anthracis spores back to a single-spore batch in Ivins's lab at the US ARMY Medical Research Institute of Infectious diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Consequently, the country's numerous lakes, rivers and coastal waters have suffered from repeated outbreaks of algal blooms owing to the excess of nutrients polluting the water.
and was developed by Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech, a joint venture between the Jalna-based Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company and the US seed giant Monsanto,
preserving the control of seeds and food in the hands of our farmers and consumers instead of a few multinational corporations like Monsanto, says Gangula Ramanjaneyulu, director of the Centre for Sustainable agriculture in Hyderabad.
We have no less than ten GM products to get into the regulatory system for trials including brinjal, chickpea, sorghum, sugar cane, castor oil plant,
as has happened with Bt cotton (see'Illegal seeds overtake India's cotton fields').'Indeed, Chinese farmers had been growing Bt rice for five years before receiving official government approval just four months ago,
Ramanjaneyulu believes that the environment ministry should now confiscate the transgenic brinjal seeds held by Mahyco.
Business Stem-cell patents: Fate Therapeutics, a biotech company based in San diego, California, has been granted the first US patent for genetic reprogramming technology to create induced pluripotent stem (ips) cells.
The 4 february licence came shortly after a rival Californian company, ipierian of San francisco, was awarded Britain's first patent for ips cell reprogramming (see Nature 463,592-593;
Seeds of progress: German chemicals company BASF has received its first approval to market genetically modified seeds.
Its herbicide-tolerant soya bean'Cultivance, 'which was developed with Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Cooperation, can now be sold in Brazil.
Farmers will start planting the seed next year, the company expects if China, the United states and Europe approve the variety for import.
%and include ethanol made from sugarcane) must cover the remainder. But the EPA has scaled also back the 2010 requirement for cellulosic biofuels,
in plants such as sugar cane and maize (corn), which use a different type of photosynthesis, 110 out of 10,000 atoms are carbon-13.
Because sweeteners from sugar cane and maize have a higher proportion of carbon-13, the carbon isotope ratio of the final product will be skewed.
The genome of the black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) includes genes encoding flavour-related sulphur metabolites
the truffle's spores are scattered around the forest floor. Other scents beckon the truffle fly,
but carries off fungal spores instead, spreading them between truffles. Truffle cultivation is notoriously difficult, in part because of its clandestine life cycle as an underground symbiont, in
which the fungus trades nutrients with oak-tree roots. The T. melanosporum genome also reveals that the fungus reproduces sexually more often than researchers thought.
in which two haploid cells from a single fungus each with one copy of the genome fuse to form the diploid fruiting body (the truffle),
the firm has engineered strains of yeast to produce hydrocarbon fuels and other chemicals from sugarcane feedstocks.
Research Stem-cell therapy: Twenty-two clinics around the world that offer patients experimental adult stem-cell treatments have been surveyed by the International Cellular Medicine Society based in Salem, Oregon.
The study, released on 2 april, provides information about working clinics such as their cell processing and implantation techniques although it does not rank them.
The discovery of the new forms marks the first time that the stem rust fungus with virulence against key genetic resistance has moved south of its origins in Uganda
It attacks the stems of wheat plants by destroying vascular tissue so that plants can no longer stand upright.
Infected plants produce fewer seeds and may die. The fungus can devastate harvests: for example, farmers in the Narok region of Kenya lost up to 80%of their wheat crop due to Ug99 in 2007.
Pretorius and his team analysed the genomes of the new stem rust variants and compared them to the genome of a common
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